Tokyo-based Bake, a Japanese startup behind an online cake delivery service, announced that it has partnered with Waen International, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Japanese takoyaki (or “octopus ball”) restaurant chain Tsukiji Gindaco, aiming to market the service in Asian countries.
Bake has developed a mobile app called Pictcake, which allows users to design a cake and order it online. In addition to the app, the company has been operating the Bake cheese tart pastry shop chain as well as a cream puff pastry shop chain Croquant Chou Zaku Zaku.
Meanwhile, Waen International operates Japanese curry rice chain restaurant Gin Curry as well as Gin no An pastry shops focused on Japanese fish-shaped cake chain as well as Gin no An pastry shops serving Japanese fish-shaped cake taiyaki in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macao.
Bake aims to expand the Pictcake mobile app to Asian countries. The company thinks that the expansion of pastry shops under their brands will help promote the app in the regions once it is launched.
Translated by Masaru Ikeda Edited by Kurt Hanson and “Tex” Pomeroy
See the original story in Japanese. Vertical crowdfunding sites have been popping up in various businesses like sports or gaming. As part of this hype, Tokyo-based startup Luck recently launched a crowdfunding platform called Washoku Explorer, aiming to help foodies around the world satisfy their appetites for Japanese food. Washoku (or Japanese food) was registered as an Intangible Cultural Heritage by UNESCO in 2013, which boosted the boom of Japanese food and cuisine globally. In response to this hype, the platform aims to deliver high-quality and healthy food products from Japan to the world. More than 13 million foreign tourists visited Japan in 2014, and this number is expected to hit the 20 million annual visitors milestone by the 2020 Tokyo Olympics Games. According to the Japan Tourism Agency, 97% of foreign tourists have visited Japan for the purpose of eating Japanese food and cuisine, underscoring the world’s great interest in Japanese food culture. Using the platform, food product distributors, farmers, and fisheries in Japan (dubbed ‘producer’ on the platform) are allowed to launch a crowdfunding campaign for their products. Backers, typically foodies from outside Japan, can get Japanese food products as rewards after their backing campaign is privileged. The…
Vertical crowdfunding sites have been popping up in various businesses like sports or gaming. As part of this hype, Tokyo-based startup Luck recently launched a crowdfunding platform called Washoku Explorer, aiming to help foodies around the world satisfy their appetites for Japanese food.
Washoku (or Japanese food) was registered as an Intangible Cultural Heritage by UNESCO in 2013, which boosted the boom of Japanese food and cuisine globally. In response to this hype, the platform aims to deliver high-quality and healthy food products from Japan to the world.
More than 13 million foreign tourists visited Japan in 2014, and this number is expected to hit the 20 million annual visitors milestone by the 2020 Tokyo Olympics Games. According to the Japan Tourism Agency, 97% of foreign tourists have visited Japan for the purpose of eating Japanese food and cuisine, underscoring the world’s great interest in Japanese food culture.
Using the platform, food product distributors, farmers, and fisheries in Japan (dubbed ‘producer’ on the platform) are allowed to launch a crowdfunding campaign for their products. Backers, typically foodies from outside Japan, can get Japanese food products as rewards after their backing campaign is privileged.
The platform operator has an editorial team and interviews food producers (or campaign owners) to develop their crowdfunding project page in English. The platform operator provides all customer acquisition and promotional efforts, responding to inquiries from backers in foreign languages, and overseas shipping procedures including managing food exporting regulations so that campaign owners don’t have to worry about these things. Commissions will not be charged to campaign owners unless their project reaches its funding goal.
At the time of the launch, campaigning projects included a variety of food products like pickled plum of Kishu-Nankoubai from Wakayama, Goma-Kurumi Miso Tsuyu from Nagano (soybean paste-based dipping seasoning with sesame and walnut for noodles), small-fish seasoning for rice from Hiroshima, and dried judas’ ear fungus from Ibaraki. The company aims to give foreigners the opportunity to explore and discover unknown food and ingredients from Japan.
Luck aims to transact more 1.3 billion yen ($11 million) over the platform on an annual basis in three years. Luck CEO Makoto Maemura elaborated:
For a resource-poor country like Japan, food culture is a ‘killer content’ that can generate huge revenue from global markets. However, I think that food product producers in Japan that are backing the culture have not sufficiently benefited. We want to fill the supply-demand gap between foreign consumers seeking authentic food products from Japan and food product producers who are unlikely to have global sales channels and marketing experience.
The Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington DC recently held an event featuring sushi to highlight how this Japanese cuisine has been accepted as part of the local food culture in the US and has become a popular fare for Americans.
Meanwhile, Washoku Explorer showcases Japanese food that typical foreigners have never tasted or seen before. So it will be interesting to see how the company will attract people who are less familiar with these products.
Translated by Taijiro Takeda Edited by Masaru Ikeda and Kurt Hanson
See the original story in Japanese. Yoyo Holdings, the startup known for providing mobile rewards platforms, announced today that it has secured funding from KLab Global, Gree Ventures, and an unnamed angel investor. Details of the investment have not been disclosed but the raised sum likely ranges around several million US dollars. The company fundraised $1.3 million from Gree Ventures, CyberAgent Ventures and Incubate Fund in the previous round back in May 2014. See also: Candy: A sweet mobile rewards solution from Singapore’s Yoyo Holdings Yoyo launches rewards platform in Indonesia, offers free internet access to Android users Out of all three investors participating in this round, KLab Global is a Singapore-based global business-focused subsidiary of Japanese mobile game development company KLab (TSE:3656). Yoyo Holdings is incorporated in Singapore but runs systems development and business operations mainly in Manila, the Philippines. Based on a partnership with KLab Global, Yoyo Holdings will relocate its Manila operations to inside the office of KLab Cyscorpions, a Manila-based subsidiary of KLab Global, aiming to receive substantial support for engineering efforts and corporate operations. Consisting of about 25 employees, Yoyo Holding provides mobile users with rewards platform: Candy and PopSlide. Candy is a solution that rewards users for performing micro-tasks – such as surveys,…
Yoyo Holdings, the startup known for providing mobile rewards platforms, announced today that it has secured funding from KLab Global, Gree Ventures, and an unnamed angel investor. Details of the investment have not been disclosed but the raised sum likely ranges around several million US dollars. The company fundraised $1.3 million from Gree Ventures, CyberAgent Ventures and Incubate Fund in the previous round back in May 2014.
Out of all three investors participating in this round, KLab Global is a Singapore-based global business-focused subsidiary of Japanese mobile game development company KLab (TSE:3656). Yoyo Holdings is incorporated in Singapore but runs systems development and business operations mainly in Manila, the Philippines. Based on a partnership with KLab Global, Yoyo Holdings will relocate its Manila operations to inside the office of KLab Cyscorpions, a Manila-based subsidiary of KLab Global, aiming to receive substantial support for engineering efforts and corporate operations.
Consisting of about 25 employees, Yoyo Holding provides mobile users with rewards platform: Candy and PopSlide. Candy is a solution that rewards users for performing micro-tasks – such as surveys, app installs, banner clicks or review submissions – by giving them airtime or prepaid phone credit. Popslide distributes news and weather forecasts as well as other updates and ads to your smartphone lock screen. In return for viewing such information, users receive rewards for free Internet access on their smartphone. The company’s combined user base from the two services has acquired over a million users to date in the Southeast Asia region.
Yoyo Holdings co-founder and CEO Yosuke Fukada told The Bridge that they will use the funds to strengthen their engineering development resources:
In Southeast Asia, for instance, many people use an Android phone supporting multiple SIM cards with multiple phone numbers, so we need to support models which are not so common in advanced countries. Even Facebook has developed a mobile app specifically designed for rural areas in this region, where mobile broadband is likely unavailable. In a similar manner, we want to strengthen our engineering in order to better fit the targeted markets.
Coinciding with the funding, the company unveiled that Suni Kang has joined the team. She was previously working at Tonchidot Corporation, the Japanese startup behind the Sekai Camera Augmented Reality (AR) app, followed by working in the Philippines; she wanted to fathom the market potential in the Southeast Asia region. Along with working at an IT company as a project manager in Manila, she has deepened the mutual relationship with Yoyo Holdings by writing a guest post about them for Japanese tech blog Techwave, resulting in her joining the team as a project manager and recruiter.
Aiming to attract the Next Billion Market which accounts for two-thirds of the entire global population, Yoyo Holdings plans on expanding into the Indian market by the end of this year, in addition to enhancing their existing presence in Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand. Unlike typical message apps, a mobile reward app using a lock screen will not typically co-exist with other similar apps in the smartphone since there’s only one lock screen for each mobile. Upon this understanding, Fukada and his team aim to fill the role as a dominant player in this space as soon as possible.
See the original story in Japanese. Studio Ousia is a Japanese startup known for keyword mining and linking solutions such as Linkify and LinkPlaza. The company announced Tuesday that it had won the top prize at Name Entity Recognition and Linking or NEEL, the global competition honing Entity Linking technology’s accuracy last week. The competition was held as part of the WWW2015 conference in Florence, Italy. Entity Linking is a technology of natural language processing that links keywords in text with a knowledge base such as Wikipedia. At the competition, each participant’s system was scored by its analysis accuracy – and Studio Ousia won the top prize. While most other competitors scored about 40 points, Studio Ousia’s system scored more than 80 to win the top prize, proving outstanding accuracy at such a global stage. The company is developing a commercial-use service based on the technology used at the competition, with the aim to launch it under the name Semantic Kernel this summer at the earliest. Studio Ousia was born out of an incubation program by Keio University Shonan-Fujisawa Campus in 2012, releasing a keyword linking plug-in for smartphone browser apps, called Phroni. In the same year, the company fundraised 70 million yen…
Studio Ousia CTO Ikuya Yamada receives the top prize at NEEL Challenge, Florence, Italy. Photo courtesy of Studio Ousia
Studio Ousia is a Japanese startup known for keyword mining and linking solutions such as Linkify and LinkPlaza. The company announced Tuesday that it had won the top prize at Name Entity Recognition and Linking or NEEL, the global competition honing Entity Linking technology’s accuracy last week. The competition was held as part of the WWW2015 conference in Florence, Italy.
Entity Linking is a technology of natural language processing that links keywords in text with a knowledge base such as Wikipedia. At the competition, each participant’s system was scored by its analysis accuracy – and Studio Ousia won the top prize. While most other competitors scored about 40 points, Studio Ousia’s system scored more than 80 to win the top prize, proving outstanding accuracy at such a global stage.
The company is developing a commercial-use service based on the technology used at the competition, with the aim to launch it under the name Semantic Kernel this summer at the earliest.
Studio Ousia was born out of an incubation program by Keio University Shonan-Fujisawa Campus in 2012, releasing a keyword linking plug-in for smartphone browser apps, called Phroni. In the same year, the company fundraised 70 million yen ($570,000) from Nissay Capital, followed by an additional 100 million yen ($812,000) funding from Tokyo-based system integrator NID (TSE:2349) last August.
Photo courtesy of Studio Ousia
Translated by Taijiro Takeda Edited by Masaru Ikeda and Kurt Hanson
Proofread by “Tex” Pomeroy
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-headquartered startup incubator Samurai Incubate announced today that it has invested an undisclosed sum in Israeli startup incubator Startup East. Startup East was founded about 1.5 years ago, aiming to invite Asia startup to Israei as well as encourage Israeli startup to more penetrate in the Asian region. Especially for startups in Asia, the Israeli incubator appeals that it can provide a gateway to the global market leveraging a solid relationship between the local startup community and Silicon Valley. According to Amos Avner, founder partner of Startup East, they can’t disclose details but are in talks to fundiraise from and partner with unnamed local incubators in Singapore and South Korea as well as one of the governments in the Asia region. On the other hand, Startup East has not received any financial support from the Israeli government because they are a totally private incubation initiative. They have a total of about 10 portfolio startups to date, and are focused on nourishing technology-oriented startups developing something like image processing and business intelligence. In partnership with Startup East, Samurai Incubate wants to encourage startups in Japan and Israel to communicate each others and strengthen integrating the…
Tokyo-headquartered startup incubator Samurai Incubate announced today that it has invested an undisclosed sum in Israeli startup incubator Startup East. Startup East was founded about 1.5 years ago, aiming to invite Asia startup to Israei as well as encourage Israeli startup to more penetrate in the Asian region. Especially for startups in Asia, the Israeli incubator appeals that it can provide a gateway to the global market leveraging a solid relationship between the local startup community and Silicon Valley.
Amos Avner, Founding partner of Startup East
According to Amos Avner, founder partner of Startup East, they can’t disclose details but are in talks to fundiraise from and partner with unnamed local incubators in Singapore and South Korea as well as one of the governments in the Asia region. On the other hand, Startup East has not received any financial support from the Israeli government because they are a totally private incubation initiative. They have a total of about 10 portfolio startups to date, and are focused on nourishing technology-oriented startups developing something like image processing and business intelligence.
In partnership with Startup East, Samurai Incubate wants to encourage startups in Japan and Israel to communicate each others and strengthen integrating the two ecosystems. As part of this effort, the two incubators will co-organize an event on 9 June having five Israeli companies: Startup East and its portfolio startups. This is part of Startup East’s roadshow tour visiting Japan, Korea, and Singapore, and participating startups will explore potential funding opportunities, acquiring clients, and making media exposures during the visit.
Since its expansion to Israel back in July 2014, Samurai Incubate set up anincubation office called Samurai House in Tel Aviv where they have been nourishing Japanese entrepreneur-led startups like Aniwo.
See the original story in Japanese. When I go to startup events both in Japan and overseas these days, I am usually faced with a panel discussion focusing on robotics where Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics comprise the topic that always comes up. But I think the laws should not be applied to robotics only. It is obvious that various products created by startups have to adopt them as well for the sake of people. Born out of the third batch of the Docomo Ventures incubation program last year, I see Oton Glass becoming one of the most helpful products globally. Keisuke Shimakage, CEO of Particular Design developing the smart glasses product, is attending the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences (IAMAS), a public university in the central Japanese city of Gifu, between Tokyo and Osaka. He started developing Oton Glass to support the daily life of his father who was dyslexic. Dyslexia is a kind of learning disorder where patients have no problem at all with their eyesight, intelligence or ability to comprehend words but suffer from significant difficulties in reading and writing words. In recent years, Hollywood celebrities like Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg admitted being dyslexic; the symptom occurs in 10% of the entire population in the US and Europe. Dyslexia inconveniences the patients only when reading…
When I go to startup events both in Japan and overseas these days, I am usually faced with a panel discussion focusing on robotics where Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics comprise the topic that always comes up. But I think the laws should not be applied to robotics only. It is obvious that various products created by startups have to adopt them as well for the sake of people.
Born out of the third batch of the Docomo Ventures incubation program last year, I see Oton Glass becoming one of the most helpful products globally. Keisuke Shimakage, CEO of Particular Design developing the smart glasses product, is attending the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences (IAMAS), a public university in the central Japanese city of Gifu, between Tokyo and Osaka. He started developing Oton Glass to support the daily life of his father who was dyslexic.
Dyslexia is a kind of learning disorder where patients have no problem at all with their eyesight, intelligence or ability to comprehend words but suffer from significant difficulties in reading and writing words. In recent years, Hollywood celebrities like Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg admitted being dyslexic; the symptom occurs in 10% of the entire population in the US and Europe.
Dyslexia inconveniences the patients only when reading and writing words, which leads to a lack of awareness among the general populace. However, it is obviously inconvenient as people use written words for daily communications.
L to R: Kosuke Yamagishi (software developer), Naoya Miyamoto (hardware developer), Keisuke Shimakage (CEO), Arata Shimizu (product designer) Photo courtesy of Docomo Ventures
Oton Glass was originally designed to integrate with a character recognition API (application program interface) provided by NTT Docomo, capturing images with a built-in camera, recognize them on the cloud, send synthesized voices back to the user. So the platform can support people with reading disabilities without human assistance, but Shimakage told us that their approach soon reached a technological limit.
We have learned many things through user testing. For example, when waiting for my turn in the hospital, I would want to know if my receipt number is displayed on the board. However, my behavior that tries to point my iPad camera to the target object so that the device can recognize characters in it would be annoying for people around me.
We have heard many voices saying that they don’t want to use it. We found that there was inconvenience that non-handicapped people couldn’t recognize.
When starting development of the product, the team devoted itself to increasing the accuracy of character recognition. However, regardless of how accurate the sensors they adopted for eye-tracking, it was difficult to point out the characters to increase the accuracy for recognition. Furthermore, recognizing characters takes time, so users need to wait for a speech response after gazing at the target object, which led to stressing out.
Under that situation, the team knew of Copenhagen-based BeMyEyes. The Danish startup provides a crowdsourcing platform where the visually impaired can share live video of what they are looking at via a connected camera with helpers online so that helpers will describe it over the voice chat.
While many of BeMyEyes users are based in Europe and the US, the Particular Design team thinks that they can cooperate with BeMyEyes in many aspects including encouraging Japanese-speaking helpers to join the platform as well as enhancing its use case beyond, to helping dyslexic patients.
Shimakage elaborates:
For example, we would like to further develop Oton Glass in collaboration with BeMyEyes’ existing community so that our hardware will be more optimized for their users.
When we recently exhibited our product at a conference focused on accessibility for the disabilities, we heard many voices from glaucoma patients that they want to use it.
“Oton Glass” Prototype 2013 (the initial prototype developed in 2013)
So will the Oton Glass platform pivot to a human-powered crowdsourcing from the character recognition-based technology? In response to this my question, the team’s hardware developer Naoya Miyamoto explained:
We will not give up on character recognition technology. Since technologies for eye-tracking and character recognition will further advance from now on, our solution will become a hybrid of both human-powered and machine-based character recognition.
In partnership with the researchers at Osaka Prefecture University who have joined the CREST project with their character recognition technology, the Particular Design team wants to further develop the product, closely working with dyslexic patients, experienced people from academic circles, and other startups.
While many hardware startups typically use Kickstarter or Indiegogo in their early stage as a marketing tool rather than for fundraising purposes, the Particular Design team wants to focus on solving the problems of dyslexic patients participating in user tests before putting funding, production system, and marketing expansion strategies into consideration.
Yusuke Asakura (Image: Stanford University)
In the Docomo incubation batch, former Mixi CEO Yusuke Asakura mentored the team and gave them a huge impact about where they can head to, so they expressed a huge appreciation to his effort.
We could get a supportive comment from him for the team’s future growth.
I participated in the last year’s batch (of the Docomo Ventures’ incubation program) from the screening process. I thought that Shimakage’s team deserved a nomination because I was so impressed with his passion that he wants to develop a product making his father’s life more comfortable. I think that the product born out of his real experience or motivation will be probably something gentler for people using it rather than if somebody else had done it.
I’m looking forward to the growth of the product so that it will improve the quality of lives of his father and other people suffering from the same syndrome.
Translated by Chieko Frost via Mother First Edited by Masaru Ikeda and “Tex” Pomeroy
Junya Mori
Yukari Mitsuhashi
Masaru Ikeda
